Silver fading....

Silver is becoming an official ghost. The Black Queen is still attempting to keep others from talking to her. Fortunately, the Dots and some other Duchy employees aren't afraid of ghosts. Of course, anyone in their right mind is afraid of the Black Queen. When asked about the ghost situation, Silver mused "I wonder if this is how the Laird of TS felt before he "resigned"? I'm sure Her Blackness would be thrilled if I could be driven to "resign"." Silver also pointed out that we are now on Step 5 of the Black Queen's Foolproof Plan for Eliminating Libraries in 5 easy steps (described in these pages on April 3, 2007) . The Black Queen is also once again insisting on only positive communications. There is a upcoming meeting with the {beep} software people to discuss the {beep} software. Silver isn't invited, but the issues she would like to see discussed are:

• Speed (Unfortunately, there's no good, punchy single word that conveys the exact opposite of speed.)
• All students still not getting imported
• No access to {beep} from outside the Duchy
• No access to Library of Congress from inside {beep}

However, all of those topics were considered and rejected as "too negative". So apparently they will discuss the lovely shade of teal in the Destiny screens. They might also be able to talk about the background color without wandering into forbidden territory.

In another disturbing development, one of the Duchy Librarians complained that Dotland received "new" computers this summer. For the first time in over two years, the Dots have hardware that can run the same Windows version as the Duchy libraries have had for the last two years. This makes it much easier to troubleshoot the problems the libraries have with wonderful windows and {beep}. The complaint is disturbing because "Divide and conquer" has long been a favorite Duchy strategy, always used with great success in the past by the Black Queen herself.